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georgehunter 's review for:
Sons and Lovers
by Geoff Dyer, D. H. Lawrence
This book took me a while to get through. I wasn't into fiction during winter, the first third of the book is unnecessary to the main of it, and Lawrence spends an awfully long time describing flowers, trees, and other such natural scenes.
But boy was it worth it. The descriptions of nature serve to draw out the main moments and let them breathe and take up significance. And they really do: Sons and Lovers, first published in 1913 manages to achieve something I can't really say I have found elsewhere now - an honest portrayal and description of the emotional map of life, the instinctual animal feelings that drive so much of our social behaviour and experience, and to do so in English as a first language. This is so much more than a refreshingly wide embrace of Freudian frameworks of looking at human relations, which we would do well to recover in contemporary writing. It is remarkable and blows my mind to see that English can be used this way. It is not that English is such a necessarily cold and mercantile/scientific language, but rather that we have developed a culture that has produced it as such. Lawrence shows us another way.
Our emotional lives, the emotional decisions of parents and families, set up real consequences for the lives of all of us. It was lovely to read a story that centres this understanding so significantly. More please!
But boy was it worth it. The descriptions of nature serve to draw out the main moments and let them breathe and take up significance. And they really do: Sons and Lovers, first published in 1913 manages to achieve something I can't really say I have found elsewhere now - an honest portrayal and description of the emotional map of life, the instinctual animal feelings that drive so much of our social behaviour and experience, and to do so in English as a first language. This is so much more than a refreshingly wide embrace of Freudian frameworks of looking at human relations, which we would do well to recover in contemporary writing. It is remarkable and blows my mind to see that English can be used this way. It is not that English is such a necessarily cold and mercantile/scientific language, but rather that we have developed a culture that has produced it as such. Lawrence shows us another way.
Our emotional lives, the emotional decisions of parents and families, set up real consequences for the lives of all of us. It was lovely to read a story that centres this understanding so significantly. More please!